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I remember a table in BarchesterTowers that had more character than the combined heroes of three recent novels I've read.

Anatole Broyard

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Anatole Broyard
Age: 70 †
Born: 1920
Born: July 16
Died: 1990
Died: October 11
Author
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Character
Heroes
Table
Tables
Hero
Novel
Read
Combined
Three
Recent
Remember
Novels

More quotes by Anatole Broyard

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If a book is really good, it deserves to be read again, and if it's great, it should be read at least three times.
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A book is meant not only to be read, but to haunt you, to importune you like a lover or a parent, to be in your teeth like a piece of gristle.
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Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one's own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live. There is in men, as Peter Quennell said, a centrifugal tendency. In our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.
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There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.
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People ... have no idea what a hard job it is for two writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have to talk about each other's work.
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In novels, I said, people are transfigured by love. They’re elevated, made different, lifted out of their ordinariness…It’s not so much to ask, I said. I just want love to live up to its publicity.
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The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.
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It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.
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In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people's lives.
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The more I like a book, the more reluctant I am to turn the page. Lovers, even book lovers, tend to cling. No one-night stands or reads for them.
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The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles.
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The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
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Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
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To be misunderstood can be the writer's punishment for having disturbed the reader's peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding.
Anatole Broyard
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For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.
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Chic is a convent for unloved women.
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There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience.
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Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
Anatole Broyard
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Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.
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I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.
Anatole Broyard